Leading by Example: 5 Characteristics That Make a Good Leader

Great leadership is one of those qualities that many of us have long felt the benefit of. You might think back to a time when you had an inspiring boss, who helped you feel confident, driven, and able to achieve anything. But what are the key attributes of a good leader? 

That’s a question you might find much more difficult to answer. It is certainly a crucial one to answer, if you wish to become an effective leader yourself. After all, research published by Harvard has found that leaders can account for up to 70% of the variance in employee engagement. 

The prize that comes with becoming a great leader is a big one. Past research has indicated that high-quality leadership within organisations can help bring about such benefits as higher productivity, lower absenteeism, and reduced turnover of personnel. 

Developing your own leadership capabilities, then, is an investment well worth making. 

5 Traits That Impactful Leaders Have 

Below are five characteristics that have come to be widely associated with effective leaders: 

• Courage. A great leader is courageous enough to make the right decision for their team and/or organisation. They aren’t swayed from their instincts by the mere fact of a decision being unpopular or likely to attract adverse political consequences. They know the big-picture benefit of making the right decision will outweigh such short-term factors. 
• Drive. Leaders who deliver positive impact are motivated, ambitious, and hopeful. They aren’t content with merely accepting the ways of doing things “that have always worked in the past”. They are attracted to the pursuit of objectives that are challenging, but also immensely rewarding to fulfil. 
• Delegation. The best leader recognises that even in situations where they may theoretically be able to “do everything” themselves, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should do so. A leader who has a strong sense of their team members’ respective strengths and weaknesses, and who is skilled at assigning the right tasks to the right employees at the right time, will be going a long way to empowering their team. That’s because they will be sending a powerful signal to their employees that they trust and value them. 
• Self-awareness and self-knowledge. The best leaders are tuned into their emotions and behaviours, and know why they are experiencing certain thoughts and feelings. They are well-acquainted with their strengths and blind spots, and the impacts these have on others. 
• Balance, presence, and resilience. An effective leader takes care of their inner and outer life. In their day-to-day lives they exercise, eat well, and get optimal sleep, while also maintaining healthy relationships with family and friends. All of this helps them to be present and resilient, and to inspire their team members to embrace similarly healthy practices. 

Reverse Mentoring: Learning From Those You Lead 

So, now that you know some great leadership characteristics… how can you gain them? One route to achieving this could be reverse mentoring. This is the opposite format to traditional mentoring. In other words, it is a practice where younger or less experienced employees mentor older or more senior colleagues. 

Reverse mentoring was effectively introduced by Jack Welch at General Electric in the late 1990s, to teach senior executives about the Internet. It is a form of mentoring that brings learning opportunities for both senior employees and their junior counterparts. The latter, for example, can develop leadership skills through watching and learning from a senior figure, at the same time as imparting wisdom upwards. 

Life, after all, is a constant learning process. The best leaders, even the longest-established senior executives, recognise that their self-development journey is never “done”, and that younger or less experienced employees can probably teach them a thing or two as well. 

So, by implementing a reverse mentoring scheme at your organisation, you could be learning from the different perspectives that employees of a different generation or experience set can offer, across such areas as technology and digital literacy, social media and digital marketing, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. This, in turn, can help make you a better all-round leader. 

There can be certain fears and challenges about reverse mentoring from both senior and junior employees’ perspectives. One or both parties, for example, might not see how reverse mentoring could be useful for them. So, you will need to account for such potential issues in how you design and implement your reverse mentoring programme and present it to your team. 

Would you like to learn more about the leadership coaching that could help transform you into the leader you aspire to be? If so, please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Balanced Mindset today, so that we can discuss the possibilities.